As a former tobacco addict, I'm paying a lot of attention to issues around inhaling. As Obama said, that's the whole point, right? An op-ed in the LAT addresses questions about medical marijuana. This paragraph caught my eye:

...what really shocked me was how many of my old, dear, married, parenting, job-holding friends smoke pot. I am not kidding. People I never expected dropped by to deliver joints and buds and private stash. The DEA could have set a security cam over my front door and made some serious dents in the marijuana trade. The poets and musicians were not a surprise, but lawyers? CEOs? Republicans? Across the ideological spectrum, a lot of my buddies are stoners. Who knew?

Not only do many of us use it, and not only is it likely useful as well as pleasurable, it is apparently not as unhealthy to use as a first impression suggests. The likely reason is that unlike free-burning cigarettes that fill the air with unfiltered smoke, even a joint tends to go out. And nobody inhales more than a tiny fraction of the volume of smoke guys like me generated with cigarettes.

Remind me why this pleasant plant is a Bad Thing? Why do we still put up with ridiculous pot laws? Just so Republicans can keep the votes of ignorant social conservatives?

I know it's hard to make this a burning (sorry) issue compared to torture and ecological collapse, but it's not like anything difficult needs doing. We need only stop doing something, wasting billions of bucks and ruining lives.

Simultaneous attacks on a depot in South Africa are reported to have put at risk "25 bombs's worth of weapons-grade nuclear material." But the story in the WaPo has confusing aspects and vague references that make the report less convincing.

It is actually a column by Micah Zenko, a research associate at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. IT starts by referring to an under-reported story about the security breach, which occurred last month. Why under-reported? Maybe there's less than meets the eye, and Zenko is annoyingly vague about important details.

What does he mean by weapons-grade nuclear material? What is a "state-owned nuclear facility"? I actually don't believe South Africa had 25 bombs' worth of plutonium, and that much highly-enriched uranium is very unlikely. Zenko does say this:

More important, however, is that had the armed attackers succeeded in penetrating the site's highly enriched uranium storage vault, where the weapons-grade nuclear material is believed to be held, they could have carried away the ingredients for the world's first terrorist nuclear bomb. [Emphasis mine]

We also learn that while the attackers got in on one side of the "facility" they failed on the other side. Oops. They also were caught live on camera, but no one was looking. Oops. They also tried to take a computer, but gave up. Darn.

No acknowledgement on the Belfer Center web site of this OpED piece.